I am not Japanese, and neither my computer nor my keyboard are compatible for typing in Japanese. They are compatible for English and Hebrew, which are both languages with very few letters in comparison to Japanese; Hebrew has one letter-system and English has two (small and capital).

If I want to type in Japanese, I'll install what I need on my computer, and try to find a keyboard with English and Japanese letters on it (I doubt there's one with English, Japanese and Hebrew). But what I don't understand, is how can a keyboard have so many letters on it? I mean, each Kana system has 46 letters, together it's 92, and that's without the ten-ten letters! Plus, there are the Kanji which obviously don't fit into one keyboard. My question is, thus, how do people type in Japanese with the aforementioned limitations?

This layout is consistent with the way windows IME will do kana without romaji. I did some messing around with it, and it's pretty neat, I must say. I hadn't looked into this before, so I have to thank you for bringing up this question.

Let's see. If you compare the overlay chart with a standard english keyboard, the bracket keys have the dakuten (the two little quote-like marks) and the handakuten (the little circle). When you enter those after typing the base character, it puts it into the base character naturally (not taking up an extra space, goes where it belongs, etc).

Rather pleasant. However, as far as I can tell, with using the english keyboard and the IME, you still have to tell the IME whether you want to use hiragana or katakana for your keystrokes, and flop back and forth as necessary.

An actual japanese keyboard may have a special key function to do this.

I understand that the way to type Kanji is just typing their reading in Kana or Romaji. But there are many Kanji with identical reading, so it must be rather uncomfortable to type like that.

Anyway, that's probably the best way to type in Japanese. I'm referring to Microsoft's site in order to learn how to use the IME.

It might be uncomfortable, but that's the only way to do it nowadays. Even those who use Japanese keyboards need to enter kana and convert to kanji. A long time ago before computers, there were typewriters that assembled characters from the various component parts. They were huge, expensive, and difficult to use.

Modern Japanese IME is smart, so a computer will get used to your own vocabulary automatically.

Since sooooooooo many people have asked about this, it might be best to make this an article permanently visible from the homepage, such as underneath the "Vocabulary" link on the left top of the website. B)

yea i dunno if any body saiod this because i didn't read the whole tread most likely some one did.. you install the japanese language pack and then you install IME you go on the control panel and go to religion and languages check off install east asain languages then click the detail button and add the japanese IME there is no japanese keyboard what you do is type romaji and it changes to hiragana then you press space and it changes to kanji or you can change it so you type katakana and press space so it changes to kanji..